‘the Elephant In The Room’: Trump’s Iran War Looms Over G7

President Donald Trump’s potential trade war dominated last year’s G7 as the world’s wealthiest nations gathered in Canada hoping to avert a devastating tariff deadline.

This year, it’s Trump’s Iran war that is expected to cast a shadow over the summit in Évian-les-Bains.

As the leaders arrive in France, the United States appears on the precipice of a deal to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, but crucial details over Iran’s nuclear program will still need to be addressed over the next several weeks.

The president’s decision to strike Iran and his back-and-forth over whether attacks will ramp up has him facing a more hostile crowd at this year’s summit, less impressed with his political comeback and more concerned with their own fortunes. The war in the Middle East rattled oil markets, disrupted energy supplies and fueled global inflationary pressures that have created a host of domestic political and economic problems for nations far more dependent on the strait than the United States.

“Last year was the trade wars, and now this year you get to talk about the actual war that is causing so much turmoil in the global economy,” said GOP strategist Matthew Bartlett, who served in Trump’s first administration. “Last year, I think many European leaders were on their back foot with Trump returning to power with something of a renewed mandate … Now a year and a half in, I think there’s been diminished influence, certainly with respect to the war in Iran and all of the frustrations that they had with, again, Ukraine, Greenland, his language, his actions.”

European leaders hope to entice Trump to reach a final deal with Iran by reiterating their promise to help secure the strait once an agreement is signed. French President Emmanuel Macron also invited Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and Qatari Emir Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani to the summit to discuss the strait’s reopening. Egypt’s Abdel Fattah El-Sisi is also joining the talks.

“I am sure there will be pressure on the president to bring this to a conclusion,” said a former Trump official, granted anonymity to speak candidly. “I don’t think what we’ve done is against British and French interests, and I don’t think they would see that, either. But they’re worried about the fallout. They’re worried about the day after.”

The war has taken a toll at home and abroad. In the U.S., inflation hit 4.2 percent in May, its highest mark in three years, driven by high gas and diesel prices. The Bank of Japan is expected to raise interest rates to a 31-year high, as wholesale prices have climbed at the fastest pace in three years. Europe’s central bank on Wednesday raised interest rates amid fears of inflation, though countries have fended off an energy crisis by increasing imports from the U.S.

Meanwhile, economists are warning of downstream effects of the strait’s closure — including to the artificial intelligence supply chain — and the World Bank on Thursday said the war is harming the global economy’s prospects for growth. Output in 2026 is expected to grow at an annual rate of 2.5 percent, down from 2.9 percent over the last two years — the slowest pace since the beginning of the Covid pandemic in 2020.

France, the summit’s host, hopes to use the meeting to find ways to mitigate the damage from the closed strait such as a potential global food crisis because of high fertilizer prices during planting season.

“It’s just not going to be productive to talk about certain aspects of the Iran situation,” said Philip Luck, the deputy chief economist in the State Department during the Biden administration. “The area where it sounds like the French are trying to be the most forward leaning is how the G7 can sort of help solve the broader ramifications of the closure of the strait.”

A White House official, granted anonymity to discuss internal thinking, said the U.S. goals for the summit touch on a number of policy areas, including investment and trade, artificial intelligence, Ebola, critical minerals, energy and illegal immigration and drug trafficking. The official said the United States plans to highlight its work in several of these areas and encourage other countries to support those efforts.

And a senior White House official downplayed suggestions that tensions in the Middle East will dominate this year’s summit any more than they did last year, when the president abruptly left because of the conflict between Iran and Israel.

“With last year, there was a cloud of specter around Iran and what we were going to there. It’s the same thing,” said the official, who added that while national security issues will arise, the summit is “always almost focused entirely on trade.”

But Trump has already negotiated several trade deals, and the Supreme Court has complicated Trump’s ability to impose new tariffs on a whim, blunting his ability to start new trade wars. Even as the Trump administration is resurrecting its tariff wall, it has promised to stick to trade agreements with every member of the G7.

“Things haven’t gotten markedly better in terms of tariff rates, necessarily,” Luck said. “But… we’ve gone through our stages of grief here, and we’re at acceptance. So there’s less to talk about there.”

That leaves more room for leaders to discuss Iran. Trump has complained that European leaders didn’t do enough to assist the U.S. in its military operation, rejecting requests to help enforce blockades and secure the Strait of Hormuz. And European leaders remain skeptical of Trump’s war aims and frustrated by the unintended consequences, with Germany’s Friedrich Merz going so far as to say America was “humiliated” by Iran.

“You have the United States being the reason for this historic global disruption and disruption in global commodity markets. I can’t think of a precedent where we’re the disruptor — the one who is doing this war of choice is actually a member of the G7, and it’s having effects on all the other member countries,” said Caitlin Welsh, a former senior National Security Council official during Trump’s first term and the director of the Global Food and Water Security Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “It is clearly the elephant in the room.”

Megan Messerly contributed to this report.